She said on Twitter she is looking at Dropwizard: https://github.com/codahale/dropwizard

That's focused on RESTful services so presumably also a JS templating tool browser-side or similar.

DropWizard, huh? I'd be really careful about anything that overly simplifies opening up CRUD functionality via REST. Be sure to spend some of that time you save looking into the security of your service. Easy generation of RESTful services has bitten many a Rails developer, for example.